Berlinale Dispatch. Tuya's Marriage.

I was very pleased that Tuya's Marriage beat out its rivals to win the Golden Bear at this year's Berlinale. The film takes a fresh look at an ageless story, a woman's search for a reliable man who can support her. Here, in director and co-writer Wang Quan'an's third feature, the search takes place in a faraway region of China where it has been decided by leaders in faraway Beijing that the region will be industrialized, so that rural people like Tuya, a herder, won't be necessary much longer. The search for a husband is all the more important, but it isn't any easier in Inner Mongolia.

This is not the exotic region that we've seen in other films shot in Mongolia, but still a beautiful place of hardship and poverty, which risks becoming less livable as the government makes it harder for simple people like Tuya (Yu Nan) to make a living. The story is nothing if not reality-based, yet it is clever and irreverent, and elegantly shot, with fine performances by some actors who have never been in front of a camera before.

It looks like a simple story, set in the desert against the rugged beauty of arid mountains, but Tuya turns out to have a complicated life, which Yu Nan plays in a deadpan. Tuya is a practical woman, hardworking and hardheaded, who is resisting the government's plan to settle her in a town as part of its new industrialization policy. (Sounds a lot like the old China of Mao, during which millions of Chinese from the east of the country were sent to "develop" Mongolia and Sinkiang, but now there's much more capital to move people out of the way, as we've also seen with the huge displacements of urban Chinese who had the misfortune to find themselves on land that developers covet.)

With two kids, a disabled husband and one hundred sheep, Tuya takes ill and has no choice but to find a provider to marry. There's one troublesome catch: the lucky new husband must agree to care for her current one, Bater. (He and other non-professional actors use their real names and play characters of the same name.) Disabled Bater has consented to divorce her and enter a nursing home, where - in keeping with the ways of the new China, which were present but less conspicuous in the old China - the wealthy and politically-connected get good medical care, and ordinary citizens fend for themselves.

Then begins a parade of suitors that you could imagine in stories that might have been told more than a thousand years ago. Wait a second. Isn't the conventional wisdom that China is a place where women are in over-supply, hence the adoption industry that seems to have placed Chinese girls in every Western city? Someone tell Wang Quan'an. Things soon turn into a comedy of errors. There's Senge, a handsome accident-prone herder with a new truck who always complains about a wife that we never see; there's another shy man who arrives from a distant place to propose with an entourage that could have been taken out a Chinese satirical painting from the tenth century; and there's Baolier (Peng Hongxiang), a Mercedes-driving former classmate who's gotten rich on oil in the desert, even though his fancy car can't get through the rough terrain.

The ever-practical Tuya finally decides on the wealthy Baolier, but when a disconsolate Bater slits his wrists in the nursing home, and the family needs money for bribes to save his life, Baolier's gallantry dries up. Tuya then chooses Senge for her husband. Like all the men in this satire, he's far from perfect. He's fighting at her wedding with another man. Even Tuya's young son is brawling at the event. Some things never change.

Tuya has no choice but to wear the trousers in this quirky desert romantic comedy set against China's quixotic campaign to wring profits out of the inhospitable terrain. As the men fight in the desert dust among themselves for honor and money, Tuya draws water, cooks and tends her herd on a camel. She drinks, too.

Senge, played by a herder and equestrian of the same name (a non-professional in his first film), brings a charming haplessness to his role. Bater, another non-professional of the same name, epitomizes the resignation of a traditional man forced to abandon his traditional way of life.

Cameraman Lutz Reitemeier captures the arid Mongolian desert ringed by mountains, and the spartan interiors of tents and houses pasted together from scrap where holdouts like Tuya and her brood live. Sentimentality and sanctimony about traditional ways don't have a place in Wang Quan'an's film. Among other things that the men here can't do, these characters can't even dig a proper well. We get plenty of ethnography and critical sociology without being beaten over the head with it - what is more critical than a scene in which a man with blood all over his hands telephones from the nursing home that Bater has just slit his wrists, and adds that doctors won't treat him unless they're sent the right bribes? We even see the pageantry of traditional costumes which seem to be out of place in the China that's being imposed on these characters.

Amid all this, the divorced Tuya gets married. And a wise screwball comedy comes from an unlikely place.

-David D'Arcy

The more I thought about it last night, the more I realized that the Golden Bear for Tuya's Marriage shouldn't have been such a surprise, really. Distributing the Bears, Berlinale juries seem to take into consideration the long-term impact of the awards. Take last year's choice. I've yet to run across any critic in the English- or German-language press that's agreed that Grbavica was actually the best film in the 2006 Competition lineup. Deserving of a Bear, yes, but the Bear? Not unless you consider what that chunk of gold's done for the film in the meantime. Without any awards at all, last year's festival might well have been the end of the road for Grbavica. Requiem has rolled right on, though the jury may have underestimated how much help Der Freie Wille would need further down the line.

At any rate, as for this year's Golden Bear-winner, I doubt many would begrudge the selection, whatever their own personal favorites might be. Here's wishing it has a run as long as Grbavica's. As David makes clear, for all its value as a window onto a distant world and as a dispatch on how the rapidly changing Chinese economy is impacting peoples times zones away from Beijing, this is also an engaging and entertaining story, which itself is rather unusual for recent films set in or near Mongolia. If contemporary audiences have seen this corner of the world on screens at all recently, it's most likely in the festival crowd-pleasers from Byambasuren Davaa. The Story of the Weeping Camel and The Cave of the Yellow Dog are gorgeous to look at, to be sure, but their minimalist narratives suggest a folkloric otherworldliness, a time and a place still relatively unaffected by globalization - and really, is there any spot on the globe left that hasn't been?

Coincidentally (perhaps), another film in this year's Competition is set near the Chinese-Mongolian border, Zhang Lu's Hyazgar (Desert Dream). More yurts, more ladles of milk tea. This one's very much about the all-permeating forces of globalization, but it doesn't even begin to approach Tuya's Marriage aesthetically or on any other level. More on that later.

Meanwhile, the only other reviews in English at the moment seem to be Derek Elley's in Variety and Mike Collett-White's for Reuters.

Posted by dwhudson at February 18, 2007 7:29 AM